The most recent update would suggest that fairly standard shielding charms can stop blunt impact.
“Daphne could hardly see the movement as Susan seemed to hit the corridor wall and then bounce off
it like she was a rubber ball and her legs smashed into Jugson’s face, it didn’t go through the shield but
the sixth-year went sprawling backward with the impact”
There appears to be conservation of momentum, but the momentum from typical firearms spread out over your entire body isn’t even going to leave a bruise, assuming said charms are up to dealing with something with as much sectional density and velocity as a bullet.
IMO a good model for wizard duels vis a vis muggle innovations and creative thinking is the ritualized warfare practiced in the Americas in pre-Columbian times. Lot’s of punches pulled, lots of unstated mutual agreements not to escalate, and a general low-intensity level of aggression that doesn’t get too many people killed.
IMO a good model for wizard duels vis a vis muggle innovations and creative thinking is the ritualized warfare practiced in the Americas in pre-Columbian times. Lot’s of punches pulled, lots of unstated mutual agreements not to escalate, and a general low-intensity level of aggression that doesn’t get too many people killed.
Just not partially motivated by the need to capture opponents for sacrifice?
Perhaps sacrifices are the real source of magic. Not really equivalent exchange, given the trivial uses magic is usually put to, but that’s thermodynamics for you - ‘you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t quit’.
I’m immediately reminded of discworld where technical improvements in magical theory have gotten to the point where a spell that originally required the sacrifice of a human being can now be performed using a few ccs of mouse blood.
Hmmm, what if the practice of magic is weaker in the present of MoR because ritually sacrificing a few dozen peasants for purely experimental ends is considered in bad taste?
I can see Dumbledore BSODing over the discovery that Hogwarts is actually powered by the hearts of ten thousand orphans somewhere down in the foundations.
Hm. In Chapter 74, we learn that all ritual magic requires a sacrifice, and Harry muses about all the pulled punches in wizard warfare. Iiinteresting.
Especially since Quirrell/Voldemort specifically mentions that it is possible to sacrifice “a portion” of one’s own magical power—permanently—to achieve ‘great effects’. I imagine a nefarious individual could conceive of a rite whereby the sacrifice of another wizard’s life—and by extension, his magic—would cause at least some portion of that magic to be transferred to yourself.
Perhaps older wizards were more powerful because… they had more power? One could easily conceive of Godric Griffindor using this method of execution upon potential Dark Lords in order to combat more-powerful ones.
That seems like an effective method of imprisonment. Force the wizard to expend their power permanently in rituals (or just one powerful ritual). Such a prison would be significantly safer than Azkaban, since any wizards which escape would be effectively useless. They would be permanently helpless; some might consider it an even worse fate than dementors.
On further thought, perhaps that is why the public accepts dementors. Imagine what the prison system could have been before dementors were harnessed for prison work. The state would have an incentive to label people as criminals, so that it could burn their magic. The entire situation would degrade into an ever worsening police state. The discovery of dementors for prison use would be a humanitarian breakthrough akin to the abolishing of Capital Punishment.
It’s also straight out of Vampire: the Masquerade—Vampires can become stronger and more vampire-ish by eating the “souls” of other vampires. This is considered a heinous crime in vampire society and is punishable by Final Death.
It’s also straight out of Vampire: the Masquerade—Vampires can become stronger and more vampire-ish by eating the “souls” of other vampires. This is considered a heinous crime in vampire society and is punishable by Final Death.
Which means you’d better make sure you drink a lot of vampire souls before they catch you. All of them if possible.
Huh, I thought the obvious precedent was Larry Niven’s story about a world where even minor crimes are punishable by death so that your organs can be harvested for transplantation...
Such a prison would be significantly safer than Azkaban, since any wizards which escape would be effectively useless. They would be permanently helpless.
If they had such a plan which really truly required them to be non-magical* and somehow was superior to all magical plans, they could just burn their power themselves...
* This makes me very wary as it sounds perilously close to conjunction fallacy. The set of ‘non-magical \/ magical plans’ ought to be larger than either subset...
Example: Have your enemy burn your magic. Your enemy thinks you are safe and lets their guard down. Your minion sacrifices themselves and you absorb their magic. You win.
Admittedly this plan will involve more than three things going right in a row.
Your minion sacrifices themselves and you absorb their magic.
I was going to say that this step seems like an assumption, except Eliezer just made Dumbledore say that was the secret to Grindelwald’s success, so...
But while his Muggle allies yet made blood sacrifice to sustain him, Grindelwald would not have fallen.
He never said that his Muggle allies were killing themselves; the blood sacrifice mentioned could easily be from those who were killed in the Nazi extermination camps.
He never said that his Muggle allies were killing themselves; the blood sacrifice mentioned could easily be from those who were killed in the Nazi extermination camps.
Is there a difference, from the magical point of view, between Muggle allies slaughtering each other to fuel Grindelwald, and slaughtering non-allied Muggles to fuel Grindelwald?
Arguably, his Muggle allies (assuming, as usual, that these are the Nazis) were indeed sacrificing themselves: they started a war which they lost, leading to their deaths (in many cases) by war, hanging, or suicide (the last including the Muggle Fuehrer himself).
However, I interpreted this as Sheaman did; sacrificing others may be less powerful, but it was a lot of others.
In a number of magic systems, the willingness of a sacrifice can have a huge impact on its effectiveness, ranging anywhere from a willing sacrifice granting significantly more power than the unwilling to requiring the sacrifice to be willing for it to work at all.
I’m uncertain where Potterverse stands on this, let alone MOR!Potterverse.
Assuming Voldemort’s ritual in GoF was more than empty words, willingness is important, or at least notable, given:
Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son. Flesh of the servant, willingly given, you will revive your master. Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken, you will resurrect your foe.
Italics added to emphasize parts concerning consent.
Also, many parents in the holocaust were forced to either leave there children or die. Many were forced to sacrifce themselves for their significant other or watch them both die. Consent (as wormtail shows) can be based on a wide variety of factors that might not involve you being truly aligned with how you feel about the ritual itself. A muggle might walk into the gas chamber willingly to save his/her spouses life but the harry potter verse never deals with “how much consent is consent”.
Sure. So in one ritual we know of, consent and lack of consent matters. But that doesn’t argue much one way or the other about the proposed scheme for how burning your magic might be a winning strategy.
My point in bringing it up was that we don’t know if his minions were sacrificing themselves or others, so the last step is still an assumption.
Even if Grindelwald managed to have minions loyal enough to sacrifice themselves, though, there’s no guarantee that anyone else’s minions would be that loyal. I’d say that it’s a gamble pretty much no matter what.
Perhaps there is a charm in MoR. Although in cannon there were arrows killing wizards.
I’m not really concerned about muggle vs wizard, but rather wizard vs wizard. As was mentioned earlier in the story, any spell you can throw out requires them to expend effort to negate. And guns can spit out quit a few ‘spells’ per second as well as from beyond unaided sight range. Even if a shield existed, guns would still be changing things by forcing enemies to keep up that shield at all times.
Plus there’s also the question of IEDs. They pump out enough damage that I doubt any wizard could withstand one. The IRA was active during the time period, and made use of carbombs; it would be unusual if someone like Seamus Finnigan didn’t know about them.
They didn’t have an always-on immunity to flame, they cast a Flame-Freezing Charm. Deadly impact is usually too sudden to prepare against, whereas you can see them building the fire minutes in advance.
A muggle could easily shoot an unprepared wizard. However, shouldn’t there be magical protections against firearms?
The most recent update would suggest that fairly standard shielding charms can stop blunt impact.
“Daphne could hardly see the movement as Susan seemed to hit the corridor wall and then bounce off it like she was a rubber ball and her legs smashed into Jugson’s face, it didn’t go through the shield but the sixth-year went sprawling backward with the impact”
There appears to be conservation of momentum, but the momentum from typical firearms spread out over your entire body isn’t even going to leave a bruise, assuming said charms are up to dealing with something with as much sectional density and velocity as a bullet.
IMO a good model for wizard duels vis a vis muggle innovations and creative thinking is the ritualized warfare practiced in the Americas in pre-Columbian times. Lot’s of punches pulled, lots of unstated mutual agreements not to escalate, and a general low-intensity level of aggression that doesn’t get too many people killed.
Just not partially motivated by the need to capture opponents for sacrifice?
Perhaps sacrifices are the real source of magic. Not really equivalent exchange, given the trivial uses magic is usually put to, but that’s thermodynamics for you - ‘you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t quit’.
I’m immediately reminded of discworld where technical improvements in magical theory have gotten to the point where a spell that originally required the sacrifice of a human being can now be performed using a few ccs of mouse blood.
Hmmm, what if the practice of magic is weaker in the present of MoR because ritually sacrificing a few dozen peasants for purely experimental ends is considered in bad taste?
I can see Dumbledore BSODing over the discovery that Hogwarts is actually powered by the hearts of ten thousand orphans somewhere down in the foundations.
I think we can rule that out on the basis that Godric Griffindor wouldn’t have stood for it.
Hm. In Chapter 74, we learn that all ritual magic requires a sacrifice, and Harry muses about all the pulled punches in wizard warfare. Iiinteresting.
This is one of the few speculations that I would actually like to see confirmed—I find it very satisfying, for some reason.
Especially since Quirrell/Voldemort specifically mentions that it is possible to sacrifice “a portion” of one’s own magical power—permanently—to achieve ‘great effects’. I imagine a nefarious individual could conceive of a rite whereby the sacrifice of another wizard’s life—and by extension, his magic—would cause at least some portion of that magic to be transferred to yourself.
Perhaps older wizards were more powerful because… they had more power? One could easily conceive of Godric Griffindor using this method of execution upon potential Dark Lords in order to combat more-powerful ones.
That seems like an effective method of imprisonment. Force the wizard to expend their power permanently in rituals (or just one powerful ritual). Such a prison would be significantly safer than Azkaban, since any wizards which escape would be effectively useless. They would be permanently helpless; some might consider it an even worse fate than dementors.
On further thought, perhaps that is why the public accepts dementors. Imagine what the prison system could have been before dementors were harnessed for prison work. The state would have an incentive to label people as criminals, so that it could burn their magic. The entire situation would degrade into an ever worsening police state. The discovery of dementors for prison use would be a humanitarian breakthrough akin to the abolishing of Capital Punishment.
I’m impressed. That’s WH40K-level crapsackiness.
It’s also straight out of Vampire: the Masquerade—Vampires can become stronger and more vampire-ish by eating the “souls” of other vampires. This is considered a heinous crime in vampire society and is punishable by Final Death.
Which means you’d better make sure you drink a lot of vampire souls before they catch you. All of them if possible.
Huh, I thought the obvious precedent was Larry Niven’s story about a world where even minor crimes are punishable by death so that your organs can be harvested for transplantation...
Well, that too. ;)
Apart from, y’know, still being humans, right?
If any of those previous Dark Wizards were dangerous even as ordinary humans, they wouldn’t’ve lost in the first place.
Unless they had some kind of really cunning plan.
If they had such a plan which really truly required them to be non-magical* and somehow was superior to all magical plans, they could just burn their power themselves...
* This makes me very wary as it sounds perilously close to conjunction fallacy. The set of ‘non-magical \/ magical plans’ ought to be larger than either subset...
Example: Have your enemy burn your magic. Your enemy thinks you are safe and lets their guard down. Your minion sacrifices themselves and you absorb their magic. You win.
Admittedly this plan will involve more than three things going right in a row.
I was going to say that this step seems like an assumption, except Eliezer just made Dumbledore say that was the secret to Grindelwald’s success, so...
He never said that his Muggle allies were killing themselves; the blood sacrifice mentioned could easily be from those who were killed in the Nazi extermination camps.
Is there a difference, from the magical point of view, between Muggle allies slaughtering each other to fuel Grindelwald, and slaughtering non-allied Muggles to fuel Grindelwald?
Arguably, his Muggle allies (assuming, as usual, that these are the Nazis) were indeed sacrificing themselves: they started a war which they lost, leading to their deaths (in many cases) by war, hanging, or suicide (the last including the Muggle Fuehrer himself).
However, I interpreted this as Sheaman did; sacrificing others may be less powerful, but it was a lot of others.
In a number of magic systems, the willingness of a sacrifice can have a huge impact on its effectiveness, ranging anywhere from a willing sacrifice granting significantly more power than the unwilling to requiring the sacrifice to be willing for it to work at all.
I’m uncertain where Potterverse stands on this, let alone MOR!Potterverse.
Assuming Voldemort’s ritual in GoF was more than empty words, willingness is important, or at least notable, given:
Italics added to emphasize parts concerning consent.
Also, many parents in the holocaust were forced to either leave there children or die. Many were forced to sacrifce themselves for their significant other or watch them both die. Consent (as wormtail shows) can be based on a wide variety of factors that might not involve you being truly aligned with how you feel about the ritual itself. A muggle might walk into the gas chamber willingly to save his/her spouses life but the harry potter verse never deals with “how much consent is consent”.
I wish that this comment weren’t buried behind “continue this thread”; I don’t want to be the only one who votes it up.
Sure. So in one ritual we know of, consent and lack of consent matters. But that doesn’t argue much one way or the other about the proposed scheme for how burning your magic might be a winning strategy.
My point in bringing it up was that we don’t know if his minions were sacrificing themselves or others, so the last step is still an assumption.
Even if Grindelwald managed to have minions loyal enough to sacrifice themselves, though, there’s no guarantee that anyone else’s minions would be that loyal. I’d say that it’s a gamble pretty much no matter what.
Perhaps there is a charm in MoR. Although in cannon there were arrows killing wizards.
I’m not really concerned about muggle vs wizard, but rather wizard vs wizard. As was mentioned earlier in the story, any spell you can throw out requires them to expend effort to negate. And guns can spit out quit a few ‘spells’ per second as well as from beyond unaided sight range. Even if a shield existed, guns would still be changing things by forcing enemies to keep up that shield at all times.
Plus there’s also the question of IEDs. They pump out enough damage that I doubt any wizard could withstand one. The IRA was active during the time period, and made use of carbombs; it would be unusual if someone like Seamus Finnigan didn’t know about them.
There might be a spell for inactivating guns and/or destroying them.
It’s odd that wizards are immune to flame (couldn’t be burnt as witches) and yet they’re so vulnerable to impact.
It would be interesting to throw a Spell of Coherent World-Building.
They didn’t have an always-on immunity to flame, they cast a Flame-Freezing Charm. Deadly impact is usually too sudden to prepare against, whereas you can see them building the fire minutes in advance.